Renny Harlin expects The Strangers: Chapter 3 to be released early next year
Director Renny Harlin shot an entire trilogy of Strangers movies at the same time, and while there was a point when it looked like Lionsgate might be releasing all three of the movies within 2024, that idea was clearly pushed aside. The Strangers: Chapter 1 (read our review HERE) reached theatres back in May of 2024, and The Strangers: Chapter 2 (read that review HERE) didn’t come along until September of 2025. So when can we expect to see The Strangers: Chapter 3? According to Harlin, it will probably released sometime in early 2026.
Madelaine Petsch (Riverdale) stars in this trilogy and is joined in the cast by the likes of Froy Gutierrez (Cruel Summer), Rachel Shenton (All Creatures Great and Small), Gabriel Basso (Hillbilly Elegy), and Ema Horvath (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power). The Strangers: Chapter 1 centered on Petsch’s character as she drives cross-country with her longtime boyfriend (Gutierrez) to begin a new life in the Pacific Northwest. When their car breaks down in Venus, Oregon, they’re forced to spend the night in a secluded Airbnb, where they are terrorized from dusk till dawn by three masked strangers. Lionsgate plans from there to expand the story in new and unexpected ways with its sequels.
Harlin has said The Strangers: Chapter 1 “is close to the original movie in its set-up of a young couple in an isolated environment in a house and a home invasion happening for random reasons.” Then Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 “explore what happens to the victims of this kind of violence and who the perpetrators are of this kind of violence. Where are they coming from and why?“ Harlin has also said that viewer feedback was taken into account when they were making changes and enhancing the sequels in the additional photography process. The financial success of Chapter 1 allowed for Harlin and his cast and crew, who had completed principal photography on the trilogy in just 52 days, to go back for 8 days of additional photography on Chapter 2 and 15 days of additional photography on Chapter 3.
Harlin told The Direct, “I would say that early next year is what it’s looking like (for Chapter 3). It goes into a very, very dark place. It’s an incredible privilege for a director to to be able to tell this kind of a full story. Usually sequels are done a few years apart, and it’s just like taking those same characters but putting them in completely a different situation. And the incredible opportunity here is to explore our main character for four and a half hours and see her mental situation completely changed from being a vulnerable girl in the first movie who was horrified by the act of home invasion, and then what she turns into by the end of movie three. And I will try to make it as raw and realistic as possible, instead of, you know, like a movie type of a character. So these movies will gradually get more physical and mentally more disturbing as we go into Chapter 3.“
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